The 13th annual Chicago Underground Film Festival has brought a multitude of events to Chicago both cinematic and non-cinematic. Looking at the stellar line up of film and music I continue to fall in love with the Chicago cultural underground. The vibrant live music scene continues to bring in outsiders and bring up a wonderful crop of locals. At the Empty Bottle the mix of influences and locales was fantastic with a lineup ranging from soft British vocals, hometown midwestern jangle, and slavic influenced rock. The bands fit well together in concert and made for a fantastic evening of music. (more…)

My first trip to Chicago was, at the very least, busy. After spending about 24 of the 60 total hours in the city I can honestly say I was exhausted enough to fall asleep between two large seatmates on the flight home. After seeing Art Brut at the Empty Bottle on Friday we were off to visit the Pitchfork folks at Union Park. Day one went off without too many scrapes. There were many great bands playing on the first day and we didn’t want to miss any of them, so it was very draining. You can read about both of these events by the posts directly below, but we will look into day two. (more…)

I figured it might be time to write something about what I’ve been doing in lab recently. And then I realized I didn’t really feel like it. However, I did just finish a fairly extensive modification to the Runge-Kutta methodology presented in Numerical Recipes in C which is not only easier to understand but also much more versitile for the types of numerical integration I’m interested in (plus it gives me a nice way to try out the Wordpress code plugin I’ve decided to use). So, with that in mind, I decided to go ahead and let the rest of the world know about it and contribute it back to whatever is interested. To my knowledge this type of code isn’t on the web yet and I’ll explain its usefulness below. (more…)

The good people running the Pitchfork Music Festival saw fit to give vdov.net some photography press credentials for covering the festival for the Illini at WPGU 107.1. This means that vdov.net is one of the few sources that can bring you excellent, close up, high quality, images of Hot Machines, Chin Up Chin Up, Man Man, Mountain Goats, Art Brut, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Walkmen, The Futureheads, Silver Jews, Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, Danielson, Jens Lekman, The National, Liars, Mission of Burma, Spoon and Os Mutantes, and more from one of the most important indie festivals around. We can give the inside scoop on the festival for those unable to make it. There will be plenty of live music review and we may have scored an interview or two (more on that later). At $35 for a two day pass I would say the staff of vdov.net definitely got their money’s worth and now we are passing the value added right on to you, the cynical indie blog reader. (more…)

We bought tickets to see Art Brut at the Empty Bottle on Friday, July 28th even though we knew we’d be seeing them the next afternoon at Pitchfork. Dr. Hollencomium and I had seen the group at Coachella, where they competed for a crowd with headliners Franz Ferdinand. They didn’t have a problem then, and presented an energetic, hilarious, drunken bash. It revived me even after 12 hours of music in 100+ degree weather. The Pitchfork Music Festival was almost an equal test at about 95 degrees and 65% humidity. If a bunch of miserable, sunburnt people can still rock out to your music, you’ve succeeded, in my mind. (more…)

Now that the Pitchfork Music Festival is over and all of those attending are back to the day-to-day, it’s time to get going on some coverage of the preliminary events leading up to the festival. In the next few days we’ll see a smattering of coverage from the vdov.net attendees, including myself, rhollen, shollen, and afischer. And to start it all off, I’ll be rehashing the mixed bag that was the Muse show at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. (more…)